The Day I Lost My Self (and Found Everybody)
A reflection on disappointment, materialism, and the soothing relief of oneness
It didn’t happen on a meditation cushion or under the influence of psychedelics. There was no moment of rapture, no sudden download from the universe. It happened in my living room, during an ordinary afternoon, while reading an article in Time Magazine by Steven Pinker called The Riddle of Knowing You’re Here.
The piece wasn’t revolutionary in the field—but it was to me. As I read, it became painfully clear that—according to nearly every cognitive scientist and neuroscientist worth mentioning—I did not have a self in any deep or enduring sense. I didn’t “possess” a body. I was a body. And when that body died, the lights would almost certainly go out.
There was no crisis. No spiral. Just a kind of internal dimming. A disappointing thud. So this is it? That was the feeling. Not sadness exactly—more like a slow leak in meaning. All the poetic images I’d grown up with—souls, observers, higher selves—were stripped away. And in their place was a surprisingly bleak version of materialism: one where consciousness was an evolutionary glitch, and the idea of a “me” was just a persistent, useful delusion.
At the time, I didn’t know what to do with that. I wasn’t prepared to abandon reason in favor of feel-good metaphysics. But I was stuck—not because I didn’t have answers, but because I was in love with the ones I already had. I’d spent the last year or two listening obsessively to A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, soaking in the language of presence and spaciousness. It wasn’t just spiritual inspiration—it was fuel. The thought patterns it nurtured had become a kind of internal gravity, always pulling me back toward the same questions.
Then came the new facts. The neuroscience. The split-brain data. The brutal clarity of a worldview that left no room for a personal soul. The very habits that used to thrill me—those looping meditations on awareness, on enlightenment—were now pitting me against a colder, flatter universe.
But in the midst of that tension, a familiar question surfaced:
But, isn’t everything all one?
I didn’t know exactly how it worked. But the intuition felt clean, grounded—even scientific. The idea of the big bang—of all matter and energy once pressed into a single, contiguous point—seemed to suggest that maybe separation was an illusion of perspective. Maybe all that space didn’t mean what I thought it meant.
And just like that, the dread that had been clutching at me—this vision of consciousness as a scattered, empty accident—dissolved. The thought didn’t save me by contradiction. It saved me by completion. It offered a frame big enough to hold both the science and the stillness. And it hasn’t left me since.
May 27, 2025